Mac OS X Lion: What We Love, What We Hate

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The best and worst changes made in Apple's new Mac OS.

By Scott Lowe

After its initial debut in October, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion finally arrived today on the Mac App Store, bringing a number of new improvements and over 250 new features, including multitouch gesture support, new window and software management systems, peer-to-peer file sharing functions, and more.

I've spent the day installing, configuring, and utilizing Mac OS X Lion on a variety of machines, including a 2009 27-inch iMac, 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, and a 2010 11-inch MacBook Air. Thus far, my experiences with Apple's new OS have been largely positive, but there are also a handful of changes I'm less fond of.

AirDrop Apple's new peer-to-peer sharing solution, AirDrop, is easily my favorite feature of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Integrated into the new Finder design, AirDrop allows you to find, connect, and share files with nearby Lion-enabled Macs using Wi-Fi. Instead of connecting via a web client, uploading files via FTP, or having to throw the data onto a disc or thumbdrive, you can simply initialize AirDrop on two or more computers, and using a basic computer-to-computer Wi-Fi connection, drag and drop files, media, or even entire applications. Once the recipient accepts, the transfer, even for larger files, is lightning fast. As someone who often starts work at the office and continues it at home, the ability to simply drag files from my work Mac to my MacBook Air is extremely helpful.

Mail Conversations If your job requires constant email communication, you undoubtedly find yourself sifting through weeks or even months of emails all of the time. While the Mail app's search function worked well in the past, keeping track of an email thread's progression is incredible difficult. The new Mac Mail client, however, adds conversation groupings, which organize all emails associated to a common chain in one scrollable panel, allowing you to go all the way back to the original email without having to meticulously scour your inbox.

Auto Saving and Versions Though currently limited to Apple's native applications like TextEdit, Apple has now implemented a new auto saving feature, which automatically saves your changes to a document, as you make them. Moreover, the feature also includes a backup feature, which saves all previous versions of the same document, which can be viewed and restored at any time.

In other words, the day of punching your computer monitor after you computer crashes and deleting all of your unsaved work are over.

Expanded Multitouch Gesture Support Touch-enabled gesture controls using Apple's trackpad was one of my favorite features of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Apple has expanded the range of gesture-based controls with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Now, with a trackpad-enabled MacBook notebook or trackpad add-on for your Mac desktop you can use gesture controls to navigate the OS and a variety of applications therein.

With two or three fingers, and occasional use of your thumb, you can bring up the Launchpad and Mission Control, move in and out of applications, and scroll through pages.

My favorite application for gesture controls, however, is backward and forward page browsing within Safari, which allows you to quickly and efficiently return to the last page you viewed or move on to the next one. What makes the feature particularly compelling is that when you move to and from previous pages, Safari doesn't actually require a refresh, allowing you to navigate smoothly without fear of losing your place or a piece of data on a page.

Launchpad The Mac OS X dock is the simplest way to access the programs you use most, but if you're anything like me, you want to keep it as small and free from clutter as possible. Unfortunately, eliminating apps that are valuable, albeit less essential for day-to-day activities, also makes it more difficult to find and launch them. Enter Launchpad.

Launchpad arranges all of your installed applications in an iOS-esque interface, allowing you to get a full view of your software in a visually pleasing way. Applications can be grouped into iOS-style folders, which can be titled and organized according to your needs.

What We Hate

Inverted Scrolling One of the first things I noticed after installing Mac OS X 10.7 was that Apple had inverted scrolling functions; in other words, reversing the traditional scrolling orientation of standard mice and the trackpad. When you roll your scroll wheel or do a two-finger swipe upward, the page scrolls down, and vice versa. The thought process is that the experience is more intuitive and mimics the scrolling gestures used on iOS, but at first, it's anything but.

Fortunately, Apple allows you to change the scrolling orientation within the mouse and trackpad system settings, but the inverted scrolling is somewhat unwieldy until that point.

Download-Only Availability I'm a fan of the ease and convenience of digitally distributed software and media, but Apple's insistence on making the Mac App Store the exclusive retail distribution method for Mac OS X Lion is a bit unreasonable. Had I not had the benefit of an industrial grade connection at the IGN offices, I would have been beholden to Comcast's piss-poor excuse for broadband cable internet at home, pushing the download time from 15 minutes to what would have surely been an hour or more.

Apple will not offer disc-based versions of the OS at any point, and thumbsticks preloaded with Lion won't go on sale until August for an extra $30 over the list price, at $69.99.

No Java Support Out-of-the-Box In an effort to push new standards for software development on Mac, Apple has eliminated support for Java applications in Mac OS X Lion, creating issues with older third-party applications, including many Adobe programs. As a result, I noticed several programs I use regularly would not launch, and if they did, freeze shortly thereafter due to this lacking support.

On the upside, when you try to open an application that requires Java, Lion immediately prompts users to initiate an optional download to add Java support. Since there's a simple work around, its not a huge issue, but making users download and install software almost immediately in order to use their favorite applications is far from ideal.